The return of the chip giant to the production and marketing of dedicated graphics with Intel Arc Alchemist should be a breath of fresh air for the graphics chip segment and a necessary alternative to the duopoly of AMD and NVIDIA at a time when the lack of stock has the nerves of retailers and consumers.
Although we will have to wait to test the commercial versions that should start arriving during this quarter, the news that continues to arrive from Intel graphics they are promising. Intel will market different versions in performance and price to suit the needs of consumers. We had seen something of the versions for the entry and middle range, Arc A350 and Arc 380 respectively, and now we are receiving data from the high range.
Intel Arc Alchemist: good previews
A new benchmark entry has been spotted on the SiSoftware website. It says it corresponds to an Intel DG2-512EU silicon tested on a desktop Coffee Lake-S platform, which suggests that it is a dedicated graphics card. It shows a working frequency of 2.1 GHz, 512 execution units and 4096 CuDA cores.
The results show that outperforms to an NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti in most benchmarks. They are performance data for the general use of the GPU or, what is the same, synthetic test results that should be taken with caution until we see them transferred to more real user tasks, but as we said, they are very promising. With a score of 9017 Mpix/s, the Intel Arc Alchemist is 7.7% faster than NVIDIA’s card, which delivers 8369 Mpix/s in the same test.
The list speaks of 12.8 Gbytes of memory, although it may be an unrealistic count since we know that Intel’s high-end range will have 16 Gbytes of dedicated GDDR6 memory with a 256-bit memory bus. The core frequency could go up in turbo mode to 2.5 GHz and its power in TPB would be around 225 watts.
We lack more concrete data and evidence, but the best we can say from what we have seen so far is that we are going to have a third actor in dedicated graphics that contribution of alternatives and competition to the two great. Which should lead to better products and lower prices. We must not forget that Intel leads sales in total graphics chips (thanks to those integrated in CPUs) and that it has made a large investment in technologies, silicon and talent, for the new division led by Raja Koduri that should show its fruits this same quarter.
